Ethereum-based Industrial Supply Chain Management with Multi-item Batch Transactions

Abstract

Industrial supply chains involve multiple stakeholders, complex logistics operations, and financial transactions that require transparency, traceability, and secure coordination.Traditional supply chain systems suffer from limited transparency, the risk of data manipulation, and insufficient trust among participants.To address these challenges, this paper proposes a decentralized industrial supply chain management system implemented on an Ethereum-compatible blockchain network.The proposed architecture integrates smart contracts to automate workflows, including stakeholder registration and verification, multi-item order processing, shipment tracking, simulated delivery verification (SDV), and escrow-based conditional payment settlement.The system adopts a hybrid on-chain/off-chain storage architecture in which transactional records are maintained on-chain, while raw material and product images are stored off-chain using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).This design reduces blockchain storage overhead while preserving data integrity through cryptographic hash references.To improve operational efficiency and reduce overhead from repeated transactions, the proposed system supports multi-item batch transactions during procurement and ordering, while the logistics and settlement stages maintain per-item execution to preserve traceability and accountability.Experimental evaluation was conducted on the Celo Sepolia network to measure gas consumption and transaction fees for both batch-based and functionally equivalent per-item execution workflows under controlled conditions.The evaluation included multiple predefined workload configurations, and statistical analysis using mean and standard deviation was performed to assess execution stability.The results indicate that transaction aggregation reduces gas consumption by approximately 40-43% for raw material order creation and by 40-48% for raw material operations (addToMultipleCart).Product aggregation workflows also demonstrated measurable gas-efficiency improvements.These findings demonstrate the efficiency benefits of multi-item transaction aggregation within the proposed implementation while preserving lifecycle traceability and escrow-enabled settlement correctness.The reported results represent controlled implementation-level efficiency measurements within the proposed blockchain-based supply chain architecture.